LONDON, 1594, MAKER'S MARK A HEART OVER TWO CLUBS IN SALTIRE (JACKSON, REV. ED., P. 102, LINE 16)

Standing cups of gourd form enjoyed a brief period of popularity in England; the twenty or so known examples range in date from 1570-1611. The design of these cups was based on a traditional German form, made familiar to the English through imported examples, printed design books, and perhaps most important, German immigrant craftsmen in London. Ronald Lightbown, in Tudor Domestic Silver, records that a German visitor to London wrote in 1613 that "the goldsmiths in London were [until recently] nearly all Germans." The popularity of the gourd-form cup is underscored by the fact that seven out of the twenty extant examples remain in Moscow (six are at the Kremlin), presumably given as diplomatic gifts along with other important late Tudor silver in German style. Timothy Schroder suggests that the English gourd-form cup marked in 1585 at the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius near Moscow may have been brought to Russia by Sir Jerome Horsey on an ambassadorial embassy of 1586 (The Gilbert Collection of Gold and Silver, 1988, p. 68).

The gourd-form cup is further discussed in N.M. Penzer, "The Steeple Cup II," Apollo, vol. 71, April 1960, and in Timothy Schroder's essay on the Wilbraham Cup in the Gilbert Collection catalogue cited above. The Wilbraham Cup sold at Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, March 20, 1970, lot 202. Another gourd-form cup was sold in These Rooms, October 20, 1997, lot 342.